Volkswagen Clear Lake
Houston, TX
Filter Reviews by Keyword
By Type
Showing 531 reviews
My 2005 Jetta TDI simply stopped running while entering a freeway. It would not start. I used VW's roadside assistance to get a tow to the nearest dealer, in this case Clear Lake Volkswagen and arrived jus freeway. It would not start. I used VW's roadside assistance to get a tow to the nearest dealer, in this case Clear Lake Volkswagen and arrived just before closing time. They took the vehicle to check it out the next day. They diagnosed the problem as "bad fuel", and that "we see this all the time". A call that evening said that the car was ready to be picked up. We arrived (25 mile trip) and the cashier had the ticket and we paid close to $700. But the car was not ready yet. The back seat was still removed, the cover off the fuel tank and a hose dangling from it. It took about another hour for them to get it put back together and send someone out to get fresh diesel for it. Dee Dee had already gone home for the evening. The charge for the repair was five hours of labor, the maximum in the book for this task. A friend who services TDIs said that there is really no reason for it to take five hours. He also says that he NEVER sees fuel quality problems. This past week, same problem. Bad fuel? This time I had AAA tow it to my friend's dealership. No fault codes in the computer and replacing the o-rings on the fuel filter (the quick fix) didn't work. He later tested the fuel pumps and found that the pump in the tank no longer worked. After replacing it (ironically, with a pump that came from Clear Lake VW's supply) it worked fine, with the same tank of fuel. My belief is that the fault the first time was an intermittent problem with the fuel pump, not bad fuel. Clear Lake's did not test the fuel pump - they told me that they put a container of "good" fuel over the engine and gravity-fed it into the engine and it ran. They simply assumed that this was a fuel quality problem and not a fuel starvation problem. The combination of misdiagnosis, overcharging and false reporting of task completion leads me to NOT recommend this dealership for service. More

